That’s why they call me Mrs Fahrenheit…

Oh how I whooshed today. Here, there and everywhere, with a whoosh and a swhoosh and a sizzle.

I tried to have a lie-in and told the children I’d get up when Wonderpets started but Scarlett wanted me to get up NOW when Ady left to go to work around 7am so she was bribed by sitting on the end of my bed and watching Trap Door until Davies got up. So that intruded rather on my dreams (I do like Trapdoor lots but NOT at 7am and NOT with the theme tune repeating at the beginning and end of 10 episodes played back to back 😆 (cos there’s something down there!).

I did indeed get up when Wonderpets was on and there was comedy moments aplenty with Sainsburys own version of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. Most of the time the children eat their cereal without milk (through choice) so I tend to let them have as much as they like and then pour any leftovers back into the packets. D got a pasta bowl out and filled that up and not to be outdone S got a HUGE pasta serving dish and filled that (with about half the box of cereal!) – no, she didn’t eat it all and yes, I did pour it all back into the box again. I’d planned to do fimo-ing with them this morning but I had quite a job list and they ended up playing X box together (monkey ball thing) so nicely that I just left them to it while I; sewed Beaver badges onto D’s Beaver sweatshirt – five of the buggers and I had to check on the website to work out where to sew them all, got a bolognaise on for dinner later, fed everyone lunch, wrapped two ebay parcels, did two loads of washing and draped it around the house (we now have jeans and vests again – children have been wearing t shirts as vests all weekend! And yes, I know, I am the only mother I know who’s children even wear vests :roll:) by which time it was time to leave the house to pick up Ali and Freya, going via the post office to post said ebay parcels.

We have gone through spates of listening to lots of classical music in the car over the years. I am rather ignorant about classical music generally, knowing nothing about composers or names of pieces but I do like to listen to it and both the children do too – we had a full set of the ‘majors for minors’ type cds and things like Peter and the Wolf and Carnival of the Animals. I remembered that my Mum had had a ‘Hooked on classics‘ tape that I’d liked as a child so I got a copy from work and we played that today. It was an instant hit with Davies renaming all the pieces of music with suitable names to suit the mood they evoked and them ‘ta dumming’ along with the tunes they recognised from previous cds, adverts, film scores and of course the Barbie films featuring Swan Lake and the Nutcracker. I did lots of steering wheel drumming :).

Ali and Freya joined us, we tracked down the mis-spelt soft play centre oddly located on an industrial estate and sat in the car park waiting for someone to come out so we could park (as directed by a car park attendant type bloke). Our wait was not too long and there we were, having been treated by Ali (thanks mate 🙂 xxx) we burst forth through a small doorway into a full unit full of bedlam. 4000 children all on half term were all screaming at the tops of their voices and throwing balls as hard as they could! 😆 There was brightly coloured die cut monkeys swinging from signs, primary coloured soft covered frames with netting, lots of tables, chairs and beanbags and a decibal level to rival a Spice Girls concert in the 90s. Still the leaflets on the tables claimed that this was where ‘Kids can become Kidz’ so Scarlett became Zcarlett, Davies became Daviez and Freya did her own thing with her ‘Z’ and off they went! 🙂

Zcarlett had a great time, mostly investing her energy into learning how to climb all the way up the very steep, very long, wavy slides. First she observed, then she spent ages experimenting with approaches before finally finding the technique that worked for her using the netting as a way of pulling herself up. She graduated from this to a bent over, using hands for friction on the slide surface method and the joy on her face as she slid back down again every time was a testament to the effort she’d put in and how it had paid off. Until ‘the man’ came back and told her to stop climbing up the slide :lol:.

Daviez did plenty of the same but as a Mature Six Year Old he felt the need to come and chat every few minutes including asking us to count, asking how many he’d have to count to before certain things, creating elaborate ways of communicating whilst drinking – leading Ali and I to go off on one of our weird fanasty flights about spending a day communicating only by the use of cymbals – I could youtube blog and everything :lol:. We had some games of paper, scissors, stone including one with him in a plastic bubble about 30 feet above me and one where he tried to get me to play his made up version which included elements such as ice and fire aswell as the traditional paper, scissors and stone.

We had expected to be called out as the children had a small coloured stamp on their hands and due to the busyness they were calling people out by colour after about an hour and a half, but although our colour got a 15 minute warning we never actually got called out. Which meant we got to see the start of ‘Dancing in the middle court’ which involved a woman in a fleece directing 22 small children ranging from about 18 months to 7 years in a rather too complicated dance routine to ‘Chico-time’ – me and Ros could so make a living from doing that job, we’d be loads better :lol:. So we dropped Ali and Freya home, via our traditional lost in the one way system in Lewes detour and then came home for more enforced whoosyness in getting Davies fed and changed and at Beavers in time.

We listened to more hooked on classics on the way home until I turned it down to ask them what shape pasta they wanted with their bolognaise and we got into a long discussion about the different names of the different shapes of pasta. I told them the names for spaghetti, tagliatelle, fusilli, penne, farfalle, lasagne, linguine, conchiglie which were all I could recall offhand and delighted them into thinking up their own heavily Italian accented pasta names. Davies came up with ‘poulet’ which I told him actually is a word – chicken in French, so he says he’s going to impress everyone by calling chicken that next time it’s appropriate – be interesting to see if he remembers. So Tarly had conchiglie with bolognaise which she pronounced ‘delicious’ and ate a massive helping of, Davies had tinned pasta which I don’t believe has any such fancy name 🙄 but meant he was served it and ate it quick which was essential on our schedule. He was dressed in Beaver uniform, both of us with coats and shoes on ready to run round to the church hall the moment Ady came through the door. I dropped him off and then came home to snuggle up with Scarlett and read her a couple of stories – there was a paraphrased version of ‘we’re going on a bear hunt’ on TV on something which was a favourite book of Davies’ when he was a bit younger than she is now but I don’t think she’d ever registered seeing before so we read that which she really enjoyed. Then I went to collect Davies. Scarlett was ready for bed first, (Davies was eating custard!) so he and I watched Junior Mastermind while Ady read Scarlett some more stories in bed. Davies watched one of the earlier heats of JM a few weeks ago and was really interested to the point that he had Scarlett reenacting it with him for a few days afterwards. This was the final so there was a short film for each of the five contestants going on some sort of field trip to do with their specialist subjects and another short film about how the production team toured primary schools looking for contestants and holding heats. Clearly these five 10 years olds are exceptional characters but what struck me about each of them most was that in having such passions that they followed so closely and revelled in being ‘experts’ in it gave them such alive and interesting personalities when they talked about their chosen topic. They varied from Liverpool FC – a fairly common passion I assume, to the work of Jackson Pollock, to Tin Tin, to a cricketer (I forget his name) to The Battle of Hastings. All of them had fantastic general knowledge levels too of course, but what a wonderful demonstration of the ability in a child when allowed to specialise and spend time on their passion at such a young age. Davies counted up their scores as they got questions right or wrong and then guessed at what sort of score one of the contestants would get and generally showed a great understanding of how the game worked and what it was all about. We have a Disney trivia game in the playroom, I wonder if he’d like to play Mastermind with me asking him some of the questions from that? 😆

Tomorrow looks set to be long and tiring – Mel, with Liam and Lily is coming over as it is half term. In the style of a woman who is rather terrified at the prospect of having children off school for a whole week she has said she’ll be here by 10am 😯 so I imagine an equal time period to that they spend here will be spent after they’ve gone on Operation Clear-up, unless I can think of something constructive for them all to do, or the weather is friendly to us and we can go for a (winter) walk to the park.